What's going to happen?

The world did not end when the humans retreated into their caves. It went a bit quieter. Dolphins were seen in the waters of Venice. People outside in Beijing found they could breathe without a mask -but then put the masks back on for fear of the virus.  Will we learn from this when we start to emerge from our caves? Covid-19 is not especially for us. It's just a scrap of opportunistic biochemistry of a type that's been around since at least the dinosaurs, and possibly longer than life like ours has existed on the planet. There are other threats.  https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/ On human timescales, a couple of months ago in December 2019, most of us could not see a threat. A couple of weeks ago the UK government did not think the threat worth extreme control measures. Then the numbers mounted up, and we were imprisoned in our homes. Emerging from this crisis, can we recognise the seemingly far-off slow-burn threat that is c...

I hesitated to put these up because I kind of didn't want to scare people. Information is power. See below charts plotted from published data on mortality, then extrapolated out to the middle of April. Note that these charts use data derived from Google Sheet's GROWTH function. It's doing extrapolation of exponential growth. The extrapolation is very dependent on the amount of data gathered and may be affected dramatically by recent changes in the way the data is collected. You should not read this as an absolute prediction of the number of deaths on a certain date, it's a projection of the pattern based on the data so far. Looking at the current projections, hopefully, none of those numbers will become real. World United Kingdom As things stand, based on the public data, this shows more deaths by the middle of April in the UK than have occurred across the world by then. Hopefully, the chart will become more rational as isolation measures start to t...

This paper from Imperial College is what caused the government to change its mind yesterday. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/news--wuhan-coronavirus/ The worst case, if nothing was done. If we take all the measures currently, the model suggests the outbreak will follow the blue line. It still means we need over 60,000 critical care beds at the Spring peak of the crisis. (Better not even look at autumn, my guess is that's a problem to tackle later. Current UK government advice measures to avoid spreading Covid-19:  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-on-social-distancing-and-for-vulnerable-people/guidance-on-social-distancing-for-everyone-in-the-uk-and-protecting-older-people-and-vulnerable-adults